Denis Voronenkov

Denis Nikolayevich Voronenkov (10 April 1971-23 March 2017) was a member of the State Duma from 21 December 2011 to 5 October 2016. A fierce critic of Vladimir Putin's corrupt regime, he was murdered in Kiev, Ukraine in 2017.

Biography
Denis Nikolayevich Voronenkov was born in Gorky, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union (now Nizhny Novgorod, Russia) in 1971, and he spent his childhood in Ukraine. He entered law enforcement in 1995 and became a colonel in the Russian Army, and he became Deputy Governor of the Nenets Autonomous Okrug in 2001 before serving as a Federal Drug Control Service employee from 2004 to 2007. In 2010, while working as a professor at the St. Petersburg Institute of International Trade, Economics, and Law, he ran for the State Duma and was elected as an MP from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in 2011. He assisted in banning foreign ownership of Russian media outlets, inadvertently attacking press freedom in the country. In 2016, after losing his senate seat, he moved to Ukraine, was naturalized as a citizen, and was expelled from the Communist Party. Voronenkov, once a supporter of the Russian annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine, became an opponent of Vladimir Putin and his interventionist actions. He planned to testify against former President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych, but he was murdered in Kiev on 23 March 2017 while on his way to meet Ilya Ponomarev, another exiled MP. Voronenkov was shot three times, including in the head, and his bodyguard gunned down the killer. The Ukrainian government blamed Putin for the killing, and many foreign news outlets believed that Russia was responsible; the Russian government claimed that he had been killed in a business dispute.